The growth of Wisconsin’s Indian casino industry since the 1990s has turned innocent fun into an unhealthy obsession for some gamblers.

Wisconsin residents who once had to travel to Atlantic City or Las Vegas now can find casino gambling much closer to home.

Research has shown that a typical casino draws people from about 50 miles away, said Doug LaBelle, a social worker and problem gambling counselor in Kenosha.

“It’s just a reality,” he said. “There’s going to be a higher number of people in the area with a gambling problem.”

Calls for help

The Wisconsin Council on Problem Gambling, based in Green Bay, received 13,945 phone calls for help last year on its toll-free hotline. Although that is down slightly from the previous year, it is still up more than 60 percent from 10 years ago.

Last year, women who called the hotline for the first time ever outnumbered men, said Rose Gruber, the council’s executive director. Gruber attributes that, in part, to the growing availability of casinos, as women seem to prefer casinos to sports betting and other forms of gambling that often draw men.

The council is neutral on the development of casinos, but Gruber said problem gambling does seem to become more widespread as more people have convenient access.

“When it’s in our backyard, it certainly is easier than having to fly to Vegas,” she said.

Cultural shift

The emergence of tribal casinos has combined with the state lottery, online poker and other games of chance to create a troubling cultural shift in what passes for entertainment, said Patricia Jirovetz, an Oshkosh gambling counselor and board president of the Wisconsin Council on Problem Gambling.

Jirovetz has counseled addicts from a variety of backgrounds, including young married women in their 20s and older retired men in their 60s. Family members often ignore the problem because they view gambling as less sinister than alcoholism or other addictions.

Police reports throughout Wisconsin periodically yield stories of compulsive gamblers who resort to theft or embezzlement to feed their habits.

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Such cases:

• A former Brown County deputy treasurer was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to 12 years in prison for stealing $200,000 from county coffers.

• A cemetery worker near Green Bay was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to five years in prison for stealing $200,000 by selling burial spots that did not exist.

• An employee of Goodwill Industries in Menasha was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to five years in prison for stealing more than $500,000 from the agency.

• An employee of the Community Blood Center in Grand Chute was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison for stealing about $500,000 from the center.

• The treasurer of an Appleton youth baseball league was put on probation for three years in 2012 after stealing more than $20,000 from the league.

Further aggravating the issue in recent years has been the unstable economy, causing some people to think their financial woes can be solved at a slot machine or blackjack table, Jirovetz said.

“People need a lot of money real fast,” she said. “They’re looking for that fairy-tale ending.”